the-cheshire-cat.bsky.social
https://the-cheshire-cat.itch.io/
60 posts
35 followers
81 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Given that chatGPT is heavily trained off reddit in the first place you end up with a weird posting Ouroboros where it's basically producing what it sees as the "average" Reddit story post, which then goes in and feeds the next model, and so on and so on.
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Yeah I think this is one of those things where metrics show that the overwhelming majority of players tend to only play a game through once, no matter how replayable it's designed to be. Hence the shift to catering to completionist playthroughs rather than rewarding repeated runs.
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The Stanley Parable was making fun of this mindset in their trailers 10 years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RdV...
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I know that Pillars of Eternity has guns being treated as "the great equalizer" where their big thing is that they can pierce through magical shields, but it's not quite the same idea (also the general tech level is more age of sail than Arcanum's industrial revolution)
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I ended up writing my own in Python but honestly it didn't really help, it turns out there's actually a ton of words you can make with the combinations they give you.
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I've always thought it would be interesting to see a city builder where you have to deal with the actual politics of city planning. All the big ones treat the mayor as a god emperor who can do whatever they want, there's never really any acknowledgement of stakeholders or interest groups or anything
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Zones will be marked with the "danger" label if they're too strong in general for you, and this is dynamic based on your own level, but specific enemies in the overworld or within otherwise level-appropriate areas can be higher level and you just have to use your judgement on them
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If you've ever played FF12, it's kind of like that game where you can get access to areas *way* above your current level. FF12 helpfully just tells you what level enemies are but Exp33 is a bit more vague about it...
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It's a very weird direction for the series since part of what people liked so much about 2016 was how clear it was that Doomguy did *not* care about all the bullshit that was going on, he just wanted to kill demons
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This was an informal thing on SomethingAwful but there was also an official rule that you couldn't LP a game that was too new (I think 6 months of release but don't remember exactly), to avoid the same "everybody's just LPing the hot new release" problem that "reviewer dibs" was supposed to solve
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Keys were specific to doors but since they were always placed this way, you would never have a key behind a door that required it. You could even have interdependencies that just worked themselves out because any keys you needed would always be accessible
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There was an interesting thing the old Roguelike D&D game Dungeon Hack did, where the way the dungeon generation algo worked is that it would just build out one block at a time and if it generated a key door, it dropped the key in the space that had already been generated
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But the lack of shortcuts meant that I just had to tackle my discomfort directly. If there was a tool that existed that let me generate images without having to learn how to do it myself I don't think I would have been able to develop that skill or the confidence that went along with it
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And as a consequence of this I also got better at it and got to the point where I felt more confident about doing something that would lean more heavily on visuals and animation. I still wouldn't call myself a great artist and definitely couldn't do it professionally...
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Yeah I feel the same way, years ago I was very un-confident in my artistic abilities and would generally just avoid doing anything that required a lot of visuals when making games, but because there wasn't really a workaround, over time I got more comfortable just doing the art...
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It feels like a new variation on the old "they don't want to write, they want to have written" thing where a lot of people want the attention and accolades of being a famous artist without doing any of the actual work in creating the art
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I'd say don't worry too much about taking notes until you have the context you need as to why you would want that information
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There are bigger things but the game is a pretty slow burn and it's hard to tell what you should be paying attention to until well after you realize you've already missed a lot of information and need to go back and check again
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This includes games like DMC though; I feel like a lot of action games ultimately treat defense as a reflex test rather than something you can do proactively. I guess DMC does put more focus on things like juggling enemies to shut down their ability to attack, although this doesn't work on bosses
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I was going to say, I feel like you could apply all these same arguments to games with iframe based dodges. Ultimately they're just about pressing the "become immune to all damage" button at the time when you're going to take damage
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A funny part to me is when the very final challenge is over in one round and Mr. Beast is like "we playtested this so much and it usually went 5 or 6 rounds!". It's a 10% shot man, it's unlikely but not inconceivable that someone would get it in one.
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"Done" is better than "Good". Your first few attempts will probably feel like they are not up to your standards. That's okay! Getting used to the process of gamedev takes time and the quality will come once you're more comfortable working in the space and feel able to stretch a bit more
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If this sounds stupid it's because it is. You have to be pretty deep into their belief system already to find any of it compelling
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See, this is the thing, it's not YOU, you, it's a digital copy of you, which has no way to distinguish itself from the real you, so how can you know you aren't that copy? Also the computer can make an infinite number of these copies so really the odds of you being the copy are basically 100%
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It's not just you, there's a bunch of subtle cues that door designs use to indicate whether they're push or pull that people generally don't consciously notice. When those cues are missing/misleading, it's called a "Norman Door": 99percentinvisible.org/article/norm...
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOdg...
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The Jan Mayen one is actually a reference to an earlier easter egg from Victoria 2 where you could have an entire population of bears
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*Disappointed contractor voice* You idiot, those lesbians were load-bearing
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Presumably this hits an inflection point somewhere because it's obviously unsustainable, but I would have said we've already hit that point and they keep doing it anyway
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This has been my feeling as well, but honestly I don't know if that's going to actually stop big AAA devs from trying to keep pushing anyway. It's just going to be a case where the improvements get more and more incremental while the costs get exponentially larger
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www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxSfx...
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Not to mention that even if you find the discs, who knows if they'll even run on your current system without hours of hunting around ancient fan forums for config tweaks and fan patches, or you could just buy the GOG version that has all of those fixes bundled in already
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This is a problem in so many games. You spend ages in the character creator, think they finally look good, then the very first cutscene of the game happens and they immediately look awful under the in-game lighting and you have to go restart the game to try again
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I feel like this is something that the GTA games have done well where so many other open world games struggle - they always make sure that the simple act of driving around is fun. Fast travel is ultimately just a hacky fix for uninteresting movement
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Your odds of finding an ideal, earthlike planet are basically nil, so you're intended to settle for places with suboptimal but still barely survivable conditions, but it's entirely possible you find nothing habitable at all and immediately lose the game before it's even started
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There's a thing in an old sci-fi management game called Outpost where it starts off by having to shoot probes to find a planet to settle, with realistic odds of finding habitable planets, and a limited number of probes to fire
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I would argue that CK is actually at its best when you kind of suck at it. You get a much more dynamic game when you don't fully understand the systems because when you get good enough it becomes maybe a bit too easy to simply never have real problems and just keep winning forever
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He had a good GDC talk from a few years back where he more or less gives a retrospective over his whole career and game design philosophy: youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?...
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Nine Sols has this as a special move you unlock; it uses a Sekiro style perfect block system where blocking with the right timing prevents damage, but you can hold block to charge a special counter which triggers on release. I always found it took a bit of getting used to to use properly
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That was a thing in Galactic Civilizations 2; a problem they were running into was people were playing on the easy difficulty and thinking the AI was just dumb, so they put those messages in to make it clearer that they see what you're doing, you just configured them not to do anything about it.
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The average game of Monaco tends to quickly devolve into a mad dash around the level with all the guards on alert, trying to hoover as much loot as you can before making a break for the exit, since the stealth in that game is designed with the intention that you're going to get caught eventually
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The simplest option to avoid a lot of problems is to also tick the "upscale render texture" option here - this makes the game render natively at the specified resolution and upscale to fit the screen size, so mixels are impossible
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I'm making a side scrolling survival horror. Think something like ABUSE meets Aliens: Infestation.
Steam Store page and Patreon stuff some time in the new year!